(Free) Speech Disorder

This always struck me as preposterous. Of course students shed some of their
rights at the schoolhouse gate. That's the whole idea behind the concept of
in loco parentis. Teachers and administrators
get to act like your parents while you're at school. And parents are not
required to respect the constitutional rights of their kids. Tell me, do
hall-pass requirements restrict the First Amendment right of free assembly?
Don't many of the same people who claim that you have free-speech rights in
public schools also insist that you don't have the right to pray in them?

Still, such buffoonery would be pardonable if the grand bargain of defending
marginal speech so as to better fortify the protective cocoon around
sacrosanct political speech were still in effect. But that bargain fell
apart almost from the get-go. At the same moment we were letting our freak
flags fly when it came to unimportant speech, we started turning the screws
on political speech. After Watergate, campaign finance laws started
restricting what independent political groups could say and when they could
say it, culminating in the McCain-Feingold law that barred "outside"
criticism of politicians when it would matter most - i.e., around an
election.

And that's why we live in a world where cutting NEA grants is called
censorship, a student's "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" sign is hailed as vital
political speech, and a group of citizens asking fellow citizens to petition
their elected representatives to change their minds is supposedly guilty of
illegal speech.

That is until this week. In one case, the Supreme Court ruled that a student
attending a mandatory school event can be disciplined by the school's
principal for holding up a sign saying "Bong Hits 4 Jesus," and in another
it ruled that a pro-life group can, in fact, urge citizens to contact their
senators even if one of the senators happens to be running for re-election.
Staggeringly, these were close and controversial calls.

Many self-described liberals and reformers think it should be the other way
around. Teenage students should have unfettered free-speech rights, while
grown-up citizens should stay quiet, like good little boys and girls. Thank
goodness at least five Supreme Court justices disagreed.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online,and the author of the book The Tyranny of Clichés. You can reach him via Twitter @JonahNRO.
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